Abstract

Workers' Rights

In the area of labor law it's not the U.S. Supreme Court that's the primary problem, it's the law itself. If the toothlessness of the National Labor Relations Board allows the bosses to violate the law at will, with no truly serious penalty, there is nothing any Court, even one full of William Kunstlers, can do to bring back a meaningful right to organize. If a more progressive administration succeeds him and pushes through new labor law that would give US workers a real right to join unions, a Bush Supreme Court packed with justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas types would gut it. Suppose, for example, that a future Democratic Congress, stripped of a filibuster, passed a law similar to Canada's, where if enough workers sign cards saying, in effect, they want a union, there is no election--a union is in place.